On September 28, the Party of the Right, a conservative debating society within the Yale Political Union, held a debate on the possible merits and demerits of colonialism, promoted on whip sheets as “Resolved: Reform the Savages.” As provocation goes, it was Milo-light, deliberately offensive, if in keeping with the long traditions of P.O.R., a cultishly obtuse and backward-looking group, self-styled cultural neanderthals obsessed with cigars and the British empire and watching Leni Riefenstahl films for laughs. They had debated the topic years ago and no one much cared.

But this being 2017, a familiar drama began. A student posted an image of the flyer on Overheard at Yale, an intra-college Facebook group with over 20,000 members and one of the grand student hubs on campus. The “Reform the Savages” announcement was peppered with inane jokes about colonialism, and capped with a picture of a generic Native American chieftain in a headdress. The Party’s chairman, Quinn Shepherd, attempted to apologize, in private, to the Association of Native Americans at Yale, but the overture was rejected, according to a screenshot of the conversation posted by the student.(“So can we apologize.... but like in /private/[?]” The student described the interaction.) Within minutes, the comments section exploded.

“How is this okay,” another student posted. “How do people think this is fine.” Calls to disband the “alt-right” group ensued. A conservative student who tried to distance herself from the Party of the Right, became embroiled in a debate with several students, eventually giving up when someone compared her to the K.K.K. In the grand tradition of spectator sports, one student began egging the conflict on: “RACE WAR RACE WAR RACE WAR.”

Rarely in the past had the Party of the Right cared much about how the rest of Yale reacted to their provocations—and at any rate they mostly failed in their mission to offend. But after over 600 students had made their opinions known on the Facebook post (the social-media vote count was as follows: 54 “shocked” faces, 149 ”likes,” and 419 “angry” faces), Shepherd posted a lengthy, apparently heartfelt apology on Facebook, bearing responsibility for the whip sheet and admitting that its ”cheap shots” at edgy colonialist humor were ”ultimately unproductive and harmful.”

The debate, Shepherd wrote, “centered around the detriment that colonialism worldwide has caused marginalized communities on social, political, economic, and cultural levels.”

The apology didn’t exactly solve things—in fact, it infuriated many of the group’s critics, who viewed it as insufficiently sincere, only a partial retreat from the Party of the Right’s position, though at least it was an apology, a bit of progress, however minor. “How could your ‘attempts to discuss’ not be an attempt to sweep this under the rug and prevent blowback, when you were the one who approved the whip sheet in the first place?” wrote one student. “Would you have reached out and apologized the moment after you approved it? Or ever, had it not gotten out? Unlikely.”

The most vehement critics of the apology, surprisingly, came not from the campus left but from the P.O.R.’s own alumni. In the Party’s private Facebook group, the Yale Daily Newsreported, graduates from decades ago tore into the undergrads for releasing a “dreadful” statement caving in to political correctness. “Only good injun is a dead injun,” wrote one. At another point, Class of 1970 alum David Zincavage suggested that the students “put on an old time Minstrel show in blackface.” None of the current members, Shepherd told the Yale Daily News, had ever met Zincavage. The story eventually leaked into the press when Fox News jumped on the controversy, turning a local dispute, briefly, into a matter of national concern.

The conflagration is a case study in how left-right battles are weaponized: Fox News, like other great powers of the right and left, is always on the hunt for the next splendid little campus war. Clashes between truculent conservatives and indignant liberals have become a reliable genre of outrage porn for an industry that thrives on cultural warfare. But it also illustrates how distorted these proxy struggles have become by the heavy weaponry of tech and media, social and otherwise. Facebook helped produce the Party of the Right’s apology—and ensured that the fight would continue.

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At Yale, discussions that happen in classrooms, and occasionally within debate societies, increasingly take place in the toxic comments sections in private Facebook groups. Any effort to dial down the outrage—as several people of varied political persuasions attempted to do on Overheard at Yale in the case of the “savages” whip sheet—has little effect. And just as in the larger world, social media is a huge reason why the center doesn’t hold. ”The people who are making these more socially cognizant arguments recognize the crap they’re going to get, and they’re not going to say anything,” said Aaron Sibarium, the former opinion editor of the Yale Daily News. The Internet, for all its democratizing potential, tends to amplify the loudest voices in the room.

It’s an irony that Facebook, a private network invented to bring college students and their alumni closer together, is now doing the most to tear the institution of college. “Education is a kind of culture. Culture is an agricultural word. We’re growing. Growing is painful,” Cole Aronson, a conservative senior at Yale used to controversy, told me. “I’ve done stupid things in college. I hope they’re forgiven. I’m willing to forgive other people for stupid things they’ve done in college.” But the Internet never forgets, and people on the Internet don’t tend to forgive.

The political battle at Yale simmered for a few generations before it exploded with the right adopting the mind-set of a persecuted minority. In 1951, William F. Buckley complained in God and Man at Yale that Yale professors stifled academic freedom and filled students’ heads with Marxist nonsense. In that regard, several students told me, things haven’t much changed: being a conservative on campus, even one with a right-wing legacy, remains a pretty lonely endeavor. Facebook shines a bright light on them. Senior Aryssa Damron estimated that there were “less than 50” vocally conservative undergraduate students out of a school of over 5,000; though after her several appearances on Fox News as the token Yale conservative, several more classmates secretly approached her. “They were like, ‘Don’t tell anyone I agree with what you said,’” she recalled. But they had seen how she’d attracted death threats on Facebook.

Damron, who planned on working for a right-wing book publisher after college, didn’t seem fazed—she joked that the only insults that affected her were the ones directed at her glasses—but admitted that she stayed off of Overheard at Yale, a private Facebook page initially meant to make fun of absurd Ivy League conversations, but now a political “cesspool” of Internet debate over who has committed sins against another’s personhood. Other online attacks have been even more personal: at one point, Damron said, somebody went as far as to look up the value of her home in Kentucky to prove that she was too privileged. “They published all sorts of private information about me. I wished they had come to me. Let me dox myself,” she joked, then turned serious. “But I did get physical threats to the point where my mom was like, ‘Do you need us to hire someone?’” (This isn’t a phenomenon limited to conservative students: around the time of a 2015 protest over racially insensitive Halloween costumes, a student told me, some activists started receiving harassing messages and death threats from anonymous strangers, their names having been published on right-wing sites.)

A member of a conservative debating society, who did not wish to be named, recounted a similar incident on another Facebook page, Marginalized Groups’ Safe Space at Yale, after a Latino student had written an article for the Yale Daily News defending a class called Directed Studies. The class, offered to incoming freshmen, often attracts criticism for its predominantly Western-oriented canon, but this student’s defense of the class provoked an unusually threatening response. “They started looking up his personal information and figured out how much his house was worth, and talking about [how] he’s a race traitor for being a moneyed person who defends structures of power,” he recalled. “Even writing ‘Drag him, drag him!’ in this Facebook group.”

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“There’s this whole conservative victimization complex that people have, especially here,” he added. “[But] it became slightly less stupid to believe it after the protest. Campus became a very unpleasant place to debate ideas with people.”

No one can deny the impact of Donald Trump on American political discourse, or Steve Bannon for giving the right an alarming patina of white supremacism, even if Trumpism itself has little purchase at Yale. “I think that the Yale conservative scene is, possibly to a fault, academic and intellectual,” Eliza Stein, a member of the Party of the Right who hoped to go into libertarian journalism, told me. That P.O.R. is frequently referred to as the campus’s “alt-right group” is a designation that means everything and nothing all at once.

Still, the trend toward perpetual outrage predates the rise of Trump. And while campus activism predates the rise of social media, too, there is no doubt that Facebook and Twitter have fueled the arms race. Damron noted that several conservatives at Yale had openly condemned the whip sheet, but as long as the debate raged on Facebook, it didn’t particularly matter. “Yale loves to protest things, and I felt like that was one of the things that they actually could have gone and actually said, ‘Listen, let’s have a good discussion about it.’ And instead they kept it on the Internet.” It’s not just aggrieved conservatives who are concerned. “At the end of the day,” said Hacibey Catalbasoglu, a senior who recently won a seat on the New Haven City Council as a Democrat, “I’ve never heard of anyone who’s had any radical sort of revelation or changed their mind through arguing on Overheard at Yale.”

Which is why I was surprised, at first, to find Cole Aronson apparently unperturbed by the tempest swirling around him. Aronson, after all, had written columns opposing mixed-gendered housing, and once provoked controversy arguing that a residential college should keep the name of its slave-owner namesake as a perpetual reminder of the college’s brutal history. (He later wrote a piece admitting that he was wrong to oppose changing the name of Calhoun College.) More recently, he argued that Yale should stop recruiting athletes (“Yale should stop recruiting Cole Aronson,” the campus’s humor Web site responded.) Given the way liberals and even fellow conservatives at Yale talked about him, I had imagined him as the next Stephen Miller, a person so aggrieved by campus P.C. culture that he’d sprint to the furthest extreme of the political spectrum. Instead, Aronson had nothing but praise for an institution at which he finds himself, somewhat ironically, a minority.

“Let me put this on the record,” Aronson said to me over coffee at the Lambs Club. “I am the luckiest student alive. I have had the greatest, most charitable, most rigorous, most kind, most helpful, most serious group of professors, across the political spectrum.” He’d never felt “any sort” of bias from them, or as if his fellow students were trying to shut him down. “I love speaking to people who disagree with me philosophically,” he continued, saying it wasn’t just limited to his friends (“Friendship is not an exercise in philosophy”). As for the right-leaning students worried about speaking up? “Conservatives shouldn’t be so damn timid.”

To be sure, Aronson had his critiques of the Yale administration—their lack of commitment to intellectual diversity, for instance—but despite the aspiring yeshiva student’s strident, grating tone, he seemed oddly content, free of the hesitancy or alarmism I’d heard from others. “I’m not on Facebook,” he said at one point, and it clicked.

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Aronson left the social network a year ago, and said it had been the best thing for him. “People can read my stuff on the Internet . . . [but] if you’re worried about the stupidification about the public square, stop making yourself stupider on Facebook. Not to mention Twitter. It seems obvious.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Cole Aronson’s column about changing the name of Calhoun College. Aronson initially advocated maintaining the name to remind Yale students of its unfortunate heritage.